The story mentioned how one of the reasons to put Bob on each CD was to make any download of the ISO longer, since the actual XP data didn't fill the CD's capacity. Someone this conjured a memory of downloading XP/2000 back in the day, when I first got DSL, and how it was almost an hour. I thought that was quick at the time. 1.5mb/s vs 56k and all.
I recently upgraded to 1GB internet, a 600mb game update took under 10 seconds. I wonder what 20 years will bring?
Probably not much. At least advancements wont be like the difference between going from 1.5 mbps to 1 gbps. It's the same reason why 10gbe ethernet has not become a common thing for consumer level desktop hardware. While 1gbe ethernet has been the standard offering since the mid-2000s. Recently lot of manufacturers have started supporting 2.5gbe. But low cost switching/routing hardware that fully supports 2.5gbe isn't quite there yet.
Here in Singapore Gigabit Internet is pretty much standard with fibre-to-the-home almost everywhere.
My main problem is that wifi is slower than that. So to benefit from faster speeds, I'd either have to upgrade to wifi 6 or lay cables throughout the house.
The ISPs here are happy to sell you faster broadband, though.
Same thing in US, but, at least in my US apartment, ethernet cables were already built into the walls, with outlet or two for each room. As I prefer desktop to a laptop for everyday work, I gladly used it.
I wonder what the accumulated climate impact of this cryptographically-validated-bloat-as-friction-for-filesharing across the claimed half-a-billion copies is on the earth.
30 MB * 500,000,000 copies = 15,000 TB = 15 PB. Per [1], that's about one month of global Internet traffic in 1999, and about 6 minutes of global internet traffic in 2017[2]. I'm too lazy to re-do this math with today's numbers, but it's probably more like 2 minutes today.
I recently upgraded to 1GB internet, a 600mb game update took under 10 seconds. I wonder what 20 years will bring?